Keep it spinning and put stuff on it, or sell it, probably for more than you paid for it. Drives on the shelf tend to fail.

10K POH is a little more than a year, so it may still be under warranty.

“Anxious to use it” in colloquial English means that you are eager or in a hurry to use it, btw. The opposite of being afraid to use it, which might be what you intended to say.

Which projects?

Can you look at the source code in the repos and make any sense of it?

Are there open issues connected to the repo, that you think you could make some headway with?

If you have 0 experience writing code, I think contributing to an existing project isn’t a good way to start. Better to text a textbook and work through some exercises, and do a few small projects of your own, before trying to join an existing team where as a total newbie, you’ll be a burden. Note that “small project of your own” can involve forking something that exists and making your own changes or additions. That doesn’t require much attention from other people.

Then, contribute once you feel you are ready to contribute.

What do you want to do with the HDD’s? I have a bunch of crap saved on mine, but nowhere near 12TB. Also I rent some drive space (Hetzner Storage Box) for server backups. That adds up over time but you don’t have to spend a big chunk all at once, and HDD prices might eventually drop again.

Feel lucky that you want HDD rather than SSD. SSD prices have tripled or quadrupled while HDD has not even doubled, per the graph someone posted.

1. I’ve had trouble getting Jami to work at all, I think because of incompatibilities between versions and whatever. You might have better luck with something like Linphone.

2. I haven’t tried a VOIP hardphone but I use Linphone on Android sometimes. I would say call quality is worse than normal cellular voice calls even those are certainly VOIP at some level too.

3. VOIP is more crap to fool around with and periodically troubleshoot, but you can get it to work if you have to. I don’t find landlines to be worth it any more (I just use mobile voice) but they’re probably still the most reliable of the approaches, and I guess it depends somewhat on your family’s discomfort level with technology.

VOIP hardphones are nicer to use than mobiles, but I guess unlike traditional landlines, they don’t work in power outages. All the ones I’ve seen rely on a power cube.

Epub is html with some crap wrapping it. Converting it to text follows the html formatting, like using the lynx browser.

Mostly pandoc (for epub to text) and a few stupid python scripts. I’m a luddite and prefer reading text files. I don’t use any particular collection management beyond filenames and grep.

Try smartctl -a on the drive (install smartmontools if needed), to see the error counts. Yeah, back up your stuff, which you should do anyway.

IDK really. I’m repeating what I saw someplace years ago. I would say do a real RAID if you manage it. Maybe RAID 5 on 3 drives.

While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID, I ended up choosing nas drives for the 24/7 intended usage,

The purpose of a NAS drive is to be LESS reliable than a regular drive, not more reliable. Explanation: if a regular drive gets a read error on a block, it will retry for quite a while before giving up. The host, meanwhile, has to wait for the data to be retrieved if the retries work. That’s all it can really do, wait and hope. Meanwhile, the waiting slows the application down.

A NAS drive instead will fail once or twice, then give up immediately, since it knows that it’s in a RAID system and that the data is also present on other disks. The RAID then puts the data together from the other drives and gets it to the host, logging the error. It will also hopefully mark the bad block on the drive with the read failure, and rewrite the recovered data to a spare sector. So this is faster than all the retries even though the drive that had the bad block gives up on it rather than attempting recovery by repeated reads.

So if you buy NAS drives, put them in a RAID.

Drives are currently around 2x as expensive as a year or so ago but they are available if you can afford them. I guess that’s better than shortages where they’re hard to find even if you can pay. We’ve had that before too.

I like to think the current situation will settle out. Who knows though. Drive space is still way less expensive than in 2010 or anything like that.

I think ID for new customers is widespread now because of the growth of scams. I enrolled at Porkbun from the US a number of years ago without ID (before they started asking for it) and they haven’t asked me for it retroactively, so I don’t think it’s required, it’s just something they do as an anti-scam measure. I’ve never tried for a UK or other national domain from them.

Try https://tld-list.com/ for comparisons.